I’m Not Doing That

If you live with someone for a while they tend to rub off on you. Suddenly drinking before 5 o’clock is okay on the weekends, you realize that the kitchen floor never looks that much better after washing it and that laundry needn’t be done until you literally have no clean clothes and have to spend laundry day running around in a makeshift toga running from room to room yelling, “friends, Romans, countrymen lend me your ears.”

The thing I’ve noticed most though is the changes in my attitude, particularly at work, where before I’d just go along with whatever my boss said, thinking that it was what I had to do to stay gainfully employed, now I take a page out of the boyfriend’s book and argue back once in a while.

 My partner approaches every day at work like they should just be glad to have him, and he wants to be treated as such. This is not to say that he doesn’t work hard, he does, but the swagger he has would be enough to get most people fired.

Recently I got a new job, and at the end of the second job interview, after congratulatory handshakes were shared, my boss told me that I’d have to wear heels. “Not super high ones,” he told me, “Just an inch and a half to two inches.” He said the words like he was gifting me with the opportunity to be a little bit taller, and I’d just never thought to do such a thing before.

I went home, took off my shoes, and stared at what ten years of waitressing and a genetic disposition to bunions looks like (I had my mother’s feet at age five, which look like most of the bones have exploded out either side. I don’t own a single pair of sandals), and decided I couldn’t take the job.

I spent that night awake, looking at shoes that might’ve fit the dress code, researching the new legislation in BC that made it illegal to force women to wear heels (and in California where it’s illegal to deny employees of either gender the right to wear pants), and my own province of Alberta where it will soon be illegal in part because a woman in my city sent out a video of her bloody feet after a shift.

When I shared all this with my partner he accused me of being on a witch hunt. “Am not,” I countered.

“Yes, you are. You want them to sign a paper that says, ‘I’m a sexist.’ It’s not going to happen.”

“It’s still bullshit.”

“So why not phone them and say so?”

I did call one of the two managers that hired me the next day with the intent of telling him where he could shove said high heels. Though it went more like this, “Hey, how chained to my wearing heels are you?”

“Not very.”

“Oh.”

“No sneakers though. When can you start?”

I went out and bought a pair of ugly little flats complete with arch support, and neither of the managers have said a word.

So it seems to me that if I’d just stood my ground in the first place it would have been easier, I’d have lost less sleep, started the job sooner and not spent three days storming around the house accusing my bosses of being sexist. Another five years of living with this man and I reckon I should be there, the laundry pilled up around us, me in the fitted sheet and him in the top sheet, as we clink our Saturday afternoon beers together in celebration.